Cannabis

Partnership For A Drug-Free America Has Moment of Clarity: Concedes Marijuana War Is Lost

The Partnership for A Drug-Free America — a government-funded Drug War advocacy group — is backing away from supporting the arrest of 800,000 Americans every year for marijuana. The 28 year-old New York group of advertising executives funded by major alcohol, tobacco, nicotine and pharmaceutical interests released a new survey this week called "Marijuana: It's Legal, Now What?" Now, we don't trust anything coming from a bunch of failed "this is your brain on drugs" propagandists, but we're intrigued when they admit:

- "It's clear that society's views on marijuana are evolving dramatically," said Steve Pasierb, CEO of The Partnership.- 40 percent of adults polled in the partnership's new survey favor ending the failed prohibition on marijuana. - 70 percent support medical marijuana.

Of course, the partnership is incapable of acting in good faith. The group's tone has shifted to "protecting the children" from "increasingly available" legal marijuana. Nowhere do they state that marijuana has been widely available to teens since the Seventies.

As far as protecting them, the partnership's preferred policies have not decreased teen access to drugs. But they have increased juvenile exposure to the toxic prison-industrial complex, in the form of get-tough-on-drugs policies like stop and frisk, baseless drug tests, juvenile prosecutions, suspensions, expulsions, shoddy "rehab", imprisonment, withholding of financial aid for college, and more. Trayvon Martin would be alive today if he hadn't been suspended from school over an EMPTY baggy that once allegedly contained marijuana. (He was in Florida visiting his father because of the suspension when he was shot to death.)

But hey, we're glad the partnership has chosen to put down the booze and pills long enough acknowledge a little bit of reality.